It really happened: In 1986, a French diplomat convicted of espionage claimed he was unaware that the Peking opera singer who’d seduced and entrapped him over two decades was actually a man.
The punch lines wrote themselves and “M. Butterfly,” now in a San Francisco Playhouse production, begins with allusions to them. But David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award-winning script inspired by those true events is much more interested in what they say about centuries of racism, sexism and imperialism.